ChinaJoy concluded its 16th session in Shanghai recently. As the world’s third largest game expo, ChinaJoy has become a key event for Chinese game players to learn about the development of the game industry. In the past few years, besides visiting Comic-Con, players have also been able to learn about many exhibitions of emerging technologies combined with games. This year, the combination of blockchain and gaming became the biggest highlight of the show.
Since the voice of blockchain landing is increasingly strong, pioneers in various fields are trying to transform the industry through blockchain technology. After the successful landing and small success in the financial industry, the game industry, which is closest to money, has become another landing field of the blockchain revolution. As blockchain games are approaching, the game theory about whether “blockchain + game” is an innovation or a false proposition is becoming more and more intense.
Pros: “blockchain + games” is the way to innovation
From the perspective of interested investment in blockchain games, the scale and operation mode of the game industry has been relatively mature. In addition, virtual tokens are used for transactions in most games, so blockchain games will become the priority scene with the most potential for the development of blockchain scale.
On the one hand, the game can use virtual currency transactions, and the model is relatively mature. In the existing game field, no matter PC game or mobile game, in order to increase players’ stickiness to the game, game developers will choose to develop virtual currency, so that players can get corresponding virtual currency rewards through the game, so that they can purchase game props to get corresponding bonus. To one of the most popular on the market at present mobile game “the king of glory and end” hero alliance “as an example, two game both in games and in games has a corresponding game currency settlement mechanism, the players in the game of virtual game currency can be used to buy local addition equipment, while in the game of settlement is to obtain money could be used to buy a hero or a bonus attribute inscriptions.
From the point of view of game audience and game influence, relying on the traffic advantage of Tencent social network, the players of the two game services have exceeded 100 million person-times. Therefore, in this relatively mature game currency system, the integration of blockchain technology and the replacement of virtual currency with game token can well solve the operation problem of token mechanism when the blockchain is implemented.
On the other hand, the game industry needs to be decentralized to ensure that all kinds of games grow evenly. The original intention of game development is to increase people’s entertainment items. Under the general trend of consumption upgrading, people’s demand for game types tends to be diversified. Such diversified market demand should stimulate the development of the game industry, but some game development companies for the purpose of making money to develop the lack of playability and serious cost of game products, so that players’ demand for quality games is even higher. In addition, the game is affected by the publicity funds of the central game platform in the promotion process, and some game products with playability may die before promotion due to the shortage of funds.
By combining blockchain with games, the decentralized nature of blockchain can effectively solve the imbalance problem in the game industry ecology. For game developers, they can not only understand players’ game needs through the high level of information transparency of blockchain, but also take advantage of the decentralized characteristics and fairness of blockchain to reduce the agency fees of game agents, thus saving the cost of game promotion. For game players, they can achieve unified management of multi-platform account data in blockchain games, ensure the security of personal information, and also get more suitable game products through the sharing of blockchain. In addition, for the game industry as a whole, the traceability feature of blockchain can effectively solve the problems of game developers such as copyright infringement, helping the industry to reduce the harm caused by pirated games.
From the current game market, many game companies have won the support of investors in different fields such as blockchain and cryptocurrency. According to DappRadar statistics, as of July 25, 2018, there are 313 blockchain game projects, accounting for 44.90% of the total dapps (697), and the number is still increasing.
Naysayers: The integration of “Big Baby” blockchain with games is a false proposition
While “blockchain + game” is optimistic by investors, there are also many developers of blockchain technology and game players who hold negative views on it. In their opinion, the growth of blockchain technology is not yet mature, but in this wave of blockchain implementation, the role of blockchain in industry innovation is too exaggerated, and at this time, the application of “giant baby” blockchain technology to the game field cannot effectively solve the problems existing in the traditional game field.
First of all, the core pain point of the game industry is still not eliminated when blockchain is applied to the game field. In traditional games, players only have the right to use the game without ownership. However, when blockchain is applied to games, the ownership of the game needs to be considered. How to translate the value created by the player’s investment of time, energy and money into the reward and sense of belonging they deserve requires a trust mechanism between the player and the game developer. However, diversified game types in the game industry still need to be managed by game development teams and operation teams, so absolute decentralization is difficult to achieve in the game industry. In terms of the fairness of the game, there is still an inequality between free players and high-paying players in current blockchain games.
Secondly, after decentralization, blockchain games face problems in development and update. In traditional games, centralized gaming platforms upgrade versions of games based on their market balance. For players, although there may be a problem that the centralized game platform can only passively accept the game upgrade because the updated version is not satisfied, compared with the decentralized blockchain game, the centralized game development platform will have better uniformity in the game update process.
At the same time, in the chain of blocks in the game, although blocks within the chain has the character of not tamper with the information, but players will most likely use node consensus mechanism to revise “the line”, “timothy” is offensive to the masses of game characters, as a result, block chain game cannot solve the player blindly and cause the shorter service life.
Moreover, the sharing characteristics of blockchain still cannot realize prop currency exchange. Although the prop currency transaction mechanism in the traditional game industry can become the technological foundation of the blockchain token mechanism, there is a large difference between the traded props in different games. In order to integrate the transaction mechanism of all games into a unified transaction system, not only the needs of players should be considered. It also needs to test the feasibility of different game currency exchange rates and cross-platform transaction processes between game manufacturers and blockchain technology developers. Therefore, the seemingly beautiful blockchain game, the advantage of the unification of prop currency is just the wishful thinking of players.
In addition, there is a lack of resources for “real” blockchain game teams. After the call of blockchain landing game came out, many blockchain teams rushed into the game market. Before the technical threshold was established, the bubble of blockchain game industry was forming. According to industry insiders, the current barrier to developing blockchain games is relatively low, and about half of these developers are from non-game fields, while 30% are from traditional game fields transforming into new markets. However, less than 5% of the development teams with real strength can bring real changes to blockchain games.
From this point of view, blockchain games in the continuous maturity of blockchain technology, its real landing effect is very little. Moreover, in the current market, most blockchain games explored by baidu, netease, Mi 360, JD, Tencent and other giants mainly focus on pet adoption. However, such games have far more financial attributes than game attributes, and their life span is also short. The real blockchain games have not yet appeared.
How to create the necessary and sufficient conditions for a blockchain game?
In the nearly 20 years of development of the game industry, although various game development enterprises constantly evolve games through technological innovation to improve the playability, as the market scale created by the game industry continues to expand, the number of enterprises entering the game is also increasing. Gamma data shows that the actual sales revenue of China’s game market reached 203.61 billion yuan in 2017, with a year-on-year growth of 23.0%. However, in the bonus period of nearly ten years, the influx of game companies have exhausted the flow bonus and IP bonus, which leads to the bottleneck period of serious homogenization and lack of innovation. In this market environment, even boutique games need to fight their way out to have a chance of survival.
The call of blockchain landing in the game field has ushered in the dawn for many game companies. However, every big change is preceded by a market bubble. In this inevitable market bubble, how can game development companies create the necessary and sufficient conditions for blockchain games to survive in the market?
First, use the information sharing of blockchain to find high-quality game IP. For now, the biggest advantage of bringing blockchain technology to games is not the decentralized nature of the technology, but the sharing of information. In the early stage of the blockchain game industry, it is not realistic for the whole industry to achieve complete decentralization, and game development still needs to be led by game development companies. In the era of serious IP shortage, game development companies can take advantage of the information sharing characteristics of blockchain to collect and find high-quality game IP, and protect the copyright of game ideas through traceability.
Second, to solve the existing shortage of talents for blockchain game development. At the same time with high-quality game IP, it also needs an excellent blockchain game development team, and in the early stage of the reform due to the lack of talent resources, talent sharing of blockchain game development will become a trend. On July 18, MagnaChain, the underlying blockchain public chain, announced that it signed a cooperation agreement with Egretia, the world’s first HTML5 blockchain platform. The two sides will work together to provide game developers with more advanced blockchain game technology solutions, and in the process, jointly establish a positive and healthy blockchain game ecosystem.
In the market, eager game enterprises can build cooperative and integrated game enterprise blocks through cooperation with blockchain technology enterprises, which is the big node in the whole blockchain game ecological industry, and integrate the existing talent resources to serve the enterprises within the blockchain game alliance. At the same time, the game enterprises from block, alliance to chain ecological transition, can largely alleviate the market pressure caused by the bubble.
In addition to having real technology, access to capital becomes especially important when a market bubble hits. Therefore, before the market bubble comes, blockchain game development enterprises need to improve their internal skills through continuous exploration and research, so as to get more capital support and survive the cold winter of bubble.
In short, blockchain gaming is coming, but the future of game developers is uncertain. The emergence of blockchain technology has ushered in the dawn of the gaming industry, but it has also brought about a big change. In this era of big changes, players who can swim against the current and stand out are the big masters of the future blockchain game ecosystem.
Article/Liu Kuang public account, ID: Liukuang110, this article first leek finance